Main fields & research methods
Development Economics, Public Economics, Law and Economics, Public Policy Evaluation, Firms and informality, Network Economics, Social norms
RCTs, lab-in-the-field experiments, non-experimental methods; collaboration with government institutions, (creation of) administrative datasets, conducting field surveys
Publications
"The speed of justice" (with Florence Kondylis). 2023. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 105(3): 596–613.
Summary: VoxDev column (2018).
"Social status and egalitarianism in non-lineage-based, agrarian communities in sub-Saharan Africa: An analysis of funeral attendance " (with Abigail Barr). 2025. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 73(3): 1527-1557.
"The magic of the game: Experimental evidence on sports betting behavior" (with Martin Chegere, Paolo Falco, Marco Nieddu, Lorenzo Pandolfi). Forthcoming. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
Working papers
"Fraud detection under limited state capacity: Experimental evidence from Senegal" (with Léo Czajka and Bassirou Sarr). CSEF Working paper 731; current version here.
"Know-how and know-who: Effects of a randomized training on network changes between small urban entrepreneurs". CSEF Working Paper 622.
“Fostering official trade: Beliefs and informal trade at the Kenya-Uganda border” (with Paolo Falco and Eleanor Wiseman). Working paper (RCT completed).
Policy papers
"Data management at the Senegalese Tax Authority: Insights from a long-term research collaboration" (with Léo Czajka, Florence Kondylis, and Bassirou Sarr). 2022. African Tax Administration Paper 27, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.
Ongoing projects
"Firms' supply chain networks and tax compliance" (with Florence Kondylis, Bassirou Sarr and Léo Czajka) (multi-year project, 2nd RCT completed)
"Emerging egalitarian norms: Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment" (with Abigail Barr) (data analysis ongoing)
„Inter-firm contracting at the intersection between formal and informal sectors” (with Léo Czajka, Florence Kondylis and Matteo Moracci) (data analysis ongoing)
„Impact evaluation of the ITC-INTEGRA youth job creation program in Guinea” (mit Thomas Eeckhout, Benjamin Rühl und Mohamed Barro) (working paper)
"Social learning or spillovers - Indirect effects of technical and business skills training for small entrepreneurs" (with Francisco Campos, Obert Pimhidzai, Markus Goldstein and Bilal Zia)
Ongoing grants
Principal Investigator: Firm Networks and Sustainable Development, PRIN PNRR 2022 [Italian Government grant program for Research Projects of National Interest], Nov 2023-Feb 2026, grant amount: 299.797€